Novelist Knows Hollywood's Bleak Houses

By BERNARD WEINRAUB

Published: August 12, 1996

HOLLYWOOD, Aug. 11—
At the age of 8, Bruce Wagner moved with his family to a home on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. The next year, a neighbor died of a drug overdose. ''That was the beginning of the Hollywood Babylon for me,'' he said.

Mr. Wagner is now an intense, 42-year-old writer inevitably dressed in black. He has been riveted and even charmed by the underbelly of Hollywood, a world he views as a comic hell on earth, overpopulated with hypocrites, liars and utterly loathsome moguls.

''My fantasy is to create a world like Dickens's,'' said Mr. Wagner. ''Dickens is like a beacon for me. He should be for all writing navigators.''

Mr. Wagner has not quite created a Dickensian world in his new novel, ''I'm Losing You,'' published recently by Villard. What he has produced is a scabrous look at some desperate and warped agents, actors, producers; a celebrity dermatologist who overprescribes narcotics for stars; some unstable masseuses and, of course, psychiatrists. The husband-and-wife psychiatrists in the book are an odd pair: she dismisses patients of insufficient fame, and he sees the leftovers.

To some readers, even those who live here, the characters and bizarre situations seem thoroughly fantastic. To others, though, the characters are perilously close to real life. ''I write what I know,'' said Mr. Wagner.

Hollywood, as a place and a state of mind, has been closely examined since the 1930's by authors like Nathanael West, John O'Hara and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But Mr. Wagner, whose first novel, ''Force Majeure,'' examined Hollywood five years ago, is less interested than those authors were in the woes of screenwriters and directors corrupting themselves. His focus is emotional and physical decay, 1990's style: his characters are coping with AIDS, syphilis, nervous breakdowns and heart attacks.

''I have observed at a fairly intrinsic many-layered level the Hollywood scene,'' Mr. Wagner said the other afternoon, as he sat in a lounge at the Four Seasons Hotel on Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills. He is a friendly and surprisingly gentle man despite the harshness of his work.

''If I had grown up in Detroit or a steel town, I would have tried to write about the gamut of human emotions and tragedies involving workers and their families,'' he said. ''I grew up here. It's filtered through the very public world of entertainment.

''There's something sexy about Hollywood, and to be an anthropologist in Hollywood may be the sexiest gig of all. This place is a breeding ground for a weird lack of control.''

The book's title, ''I'm Losing You,'' is one of the most common phrases heard all day in Los Angeles, as people connect and disconnect over their cellular phones.

''It's all about loss, this book,'' said the author, who was married briefly several years ago, has no children and lives alone in Santa Monica. ''And it's about truncated relationships, truncated lives, do you know what I mean? How many times do you have some emotionally epic conversation over the cellular phone, and you're just cut off?''

Critics have generally praised ''I'm Losing You,'' but often with reservations. ''These people are not well,'' wrote John Updike, reviewing the book in The New Yorker. ''Wagner's verbal animation rarely flags in his grisly tour of broken dreams and metastasizing cancers, but this reader found himself counting the pages left to go in a wasteland so unrelievedly cratered.''

Asked if the characters and situations in the book represent the reality of Hollywood, Mr. Wagner shrugged and listed some recent subjects of the television tabloid shows. ''Look at Robert Downey Jr., drug-addled and found by a stranger in a bed,'' he said. ''If you invented it, it would sound glib. Look at Margot Kidder. She had a note scrawled in her hand when she was found homeless. It said, 'I'm dead.' It was so weirdly poetic. How do you make up that kind of thing?''

Mr. Wagner's life could resemble, in some ways, that of a minor character in his novel. He grew up in Beverly Hills, near the home of Broderick Crawford, and attended school with John Barrymore 3d and Elizabeth Taylor's children. His father, Morton Wagner, was a radio producer and is now a stockbroker in New York City.

At 16, Bruce Wagner dropped out of Beverly Hills High School, worked at a bookstore in Century City and drove an ambulance. Later he traveled to San Francisco, where he wound up in a halfway house for people who could not cope. ''I had what they call a character disorder,'' he said. ''I was just sort of dissociated.''

Six months later, he was back in Los Angeles, where he drove limousines at the Beverly Hills Hotel; he drove for members of the Saudi royal family for a while and once transported Audrey Hepburn to the Academy Awards.

By the time he was 25, Mr. Wagner had started to write movies and almost immediately sold a script, ''Young Lust,'' a film produced by Robert Stigwood that was never released. Since then, he has written the screenplays for ''White Dwarf,'' ''Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors'' and ''Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills.'' He also wrote the television series ''Wild Palms.''

Though he's often ruthless in the description of the characters in his books, Mr. Wagner admits that he is still relentlessly fascinated by the people around him. ''I went to school with the girl whose family owns this very block, and the hotel bought them out,'' he said. ''I drove my Sting Ray as a boy down Beverly Drive. Just the other night, I went to dinner with my agent, Tony Krantz, who is Judith Krantz's son.

''We were at Mr. Chow's, and there was his mother and father sitting there. And Judith looked fabulous in her Chanel. And sitting at the next table was Larry Flynt in a gold-plated wheelchair. And there was Robert Evans and his kid, Josh, and a woman. And there was Billy Wilder and his group.

''And I looked at Tony and said: 'You know what? This is as good as it's going to be.' ''

Photo: Bruce Wagner, novelist and screenwriter, at home in Santa Monica, Calif. (Steve Goldstein for The New York Times)